Raquel Welch: It seemed like a wonderful honor to have the Film Society of Lincoln Center screen "The Films of Raquel Welch." It shows a lot of a variety in what they’ve chosen; it kind of runs the gamut of my film career.

GQ: You’re introducing the roller derby movie_ Kansas City Bomber_, and that’s a film you were involved in developing, that you co-produced.

Raquel Welch: Yes, the script came to me and I thought that it would be good since I had gravitated towards physically active roles in other movies like, 100 Rifles and Hannie Caulder, so I brought it to MGM and they liked the idea.

GQ: There are some really nice dramatic elements in it, too.

Raquel Welch: Well there are some dramatic elements, and it was the first time I played a mother and I was lucky enough to have Jodie Foster play my daughter. I didn’t know she was going to become The Great Jodie Foster but I could tell when this child walked on the porch that she was a force to be reckoned with. I thought right away, "Wow, who is this?" She couldn’t have been sweeter, but that presence was really a knockout.

Raquel Welch: You know, I saw a piece of it on television recently. It was just not the same thing at all as what we did. I guess it was the first one that’s been done since then, though.

GQ: Maybe it’s a slight homage?

Raquel Welch: I don’t think so. It didn’t have a feeling of grit about it; it had the feeling of a teenage movie. A teenybopper movie. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But mine was about women who were athletes, and damn good athletes, and they toured on a regular basis, and they got beaten up pretty good. And then the politics of it all. It was a tough life, and I got the feeling people were a little bit on edge in all that. And as a mother for her to be doing all that! I just don’t think [the Barrymore movie had] the same approach to that particular milieu of material. But nobody says it has to be.

GQ: Yours was definitely had that gritty, realistic ’70s tone.

Raquel Welch: Right. Exactly that. She was surviving. And she was wondering what her future would bring, but it did look pretty bleak. It’s a rough life. And if you have this show business element at the same time, then you really don’t always have recovery time. And you have all those women out there, but the men in the front office are really running it. Which I thought was a really nice metaphor for the way a lot of women felt about their lives at that time.

GQ: And when you first started you really burst on the scene as a sex symbol, but you were a single mom at the time, isn’t that right?

Raquel Welch: Well, I didn’t know I was going to "burst on the scene as a sex symbol." [laughs]. I mean the first part that I played under my contract at 20th Century Fox was Fantastic Voyage where I played a scientist! I was going to be reduced to microscopic size and injected in the human bloodstream traveling in inner-space to examine how the body really works, what happens with antibodies, blood cells and so forth. And then to jump from that to a dinosaur movie [One Million Years B.C.] I thought, my gosh, I’m getting whiplash here. And that one came out first, because the Ray Harryhausen special effects in Fantastic Voyage took something like eight months to complete. But that particular costume that I wore in _One Million Years B.C. _[the fur bikini], that image of me was circulated all over the world even before Fantastic Voyage really hit the screen.

GQ: You acted with some great actors. I know it’s hard to pick favorites, but did you have any co-stars that you have especially fond memories of.

Raquel Welch: Oh, I loved Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Stewart, Dean Martin, Burt Reynolds and Richard Burton. And Jimmy Coco and Perry King, in The Wild Party. And Faye Dunaway was really great and fun. There were so many!

GQ: Besides Faye Dunaway, and maybe James Coco, did you have crushes on any of them?

Raquel Welch: Oh _[laughs]_I had crushes on all my leading men, I think. Oh, you know who I really had fun with? In this movie Mother, Jugs & Speed, I really liked working with Harvey Keitel. I didn’t know what he was going to be like, because he was really quiet and withdrawn on set compared to these big personalities like Bill Cosby and Larry Hagman who were always joking around and had you in stitches. But I really enjoyed doing my scenes with Harvey. He was a non-fuss kind of guy; he was funny, he was good. I liked it. And we had a little romance going on there, a little attraction. I’m talking about in the movie!

And Jimmy Stewart is probably one of the most wonderful cinematic actors there has ever been, and the idea that I was in his presence was a big thing for me.

**GQ: What was it like to work with him, after admiring him so much? **

Raquel Welch: You know what became apparent to me was just how that he must have done so much preparation. Because you didn’t see anything happening on the set. And that means that he was already so beautifully prepared. We were filming in a place called Del Rio, and it was right near an air force base. He had a crying scene, so a jet would fly through, and of course make a mess of the sound. And he would just have to do it over and over again, and he would do it perfectly each time. And he never even seemed to be bothered by it. Which I know is probably not true. He was just unbelievable.

And I was so green when I first started, and would get so shy with fans. And Jimmy came over and said, [in perfect Jimmy Stewart imitation], "Now now now.... Raquel, RA-quel. Now there’s something you have to understand here. It’s really simple. Now these are the people that BUY the TICK-ETS. And they’ve been waiting a LONG time to talk to ya’, and you should go right ahead and do that because this is part of the job." And I thought, if he says that, it’s gotta be true, because he’s the best.

GQ: Actually I saw an interview with you from the Dick Cavett show, and you were talking about a crush of fans after Myra Breckenridge, and you said you didn’t blame the fans but the publicity people for not letting you wave to the fans, for grabbing you and whisking you away.

Raquel Welch: Waiting all that time to see you and they push them back like they’re not wanted! They picked me up and carried me into the building! It was ridiculous. I mean you’ve got to sign autographs. You’ve got to be gracious.

GQ: And Dick Cavett is going to join you on stage at Lincoln Center.

Raquel Welch: For The Three Musketeers on the 11th. And Simon Doonan is going to do the honors on the 10th, for Myra Breckinridge.

**GQ: That’s great. Have you read Doonan’s new diet book, Gay Men Don’t Get Fat? **

Raquel Welch: I haven’t! I should definitely get it before I leave and read on the plane, or at least have a peruse. Oh my gosh, the diets in this town. And in New York too.

I don’t know, Miriam, if you’ve ever had to lose a few pounds, by a certain date, it is difficult. So, so difficult. I was just reading about Demi Moore, and she was just getting thinner and thinner. It’s like a monkey on your back all the time with the women.

GQ: I’ve heard that your nickname for yourself now is "Mama Duck"? How did that come about?

Raquel Welch: Well I don’t know, because I’m a woman of a certain age, and I’ve been there, done that. And I have a lot of experience in, well, various areas. And I tend to look around at younger women and I feel kind of maternal. I’m ready to come forth with some helpful observations.

There was a young actress who was very beautiful, I thought. And everyone else thought so, too. But she wanted to leave out the backdoor of a very uncelebrated restaurant because there were a few paparazzi in the front. And I said, you’re going to have to go all the way down the back alley? And they very well may be at the end of the alley when you get there. And as soon as you run, they’re going to know you’re scared. Like a shark in the water. Just go out that door, get into your car and leave. Just build a little resilience there, like Jimmy Stewart said. And after a while you just know how to handle it. And she said, "You’re just going to walk out the front like that?" And I said, "Well, I have to. My car’s out there."

GQ: I’ve heard you describe yourself as a classic tease. Is that something you would pass on a younger generation, to be more of a tease?

Raquel Welch: But then they’re way too young for me, like Ryan Gosling.

GQ: Are you sure? I think he likes older women.

Raquel Welch: Oh? No, no, I just think he’s so interesting, as an actor and as young man. He won me over with that _Notebook _thing. He’s not doing the obvious thing, like a lot of guys do. They know they’re so good looking, and you can tell that a mile away when they walk in the room. And you wonder if you’re going to have to fight for the mirror between the two of you. You don’t get that from Ryan Gosling. Which is pretty cool.

Raquel Welch: That’s cool. But, oh GQ, there you go, One and Two. Both wet bosoms. Both wet T-shirts. You know, I thought I was so fortunate to dodge the nude scene that they were trying to get me to do. They wanted me to run through the desert with my pump action shot gun, stark naked. And I said, I don’t think so.

GQ: Wow. But that shower scene is a great scene. Because you play up to the crowd watching you and then totally switch gears before you blow them all away. I think that’s there in a lot of your films, a humorous self-awareness about your role as a sex symbol. Myra Breckinridge is an extreme example.

Raquel Welch: She wasn’t a sex symbol! She was a female version of a male mentality. Myra Breckenridge is the antithesis of sex symbol. She’s revolutionary, she’s a warrior.

GQ: Were you surprised at the reaction it got?

Raquel Welch: It’s become a cult movie. And I kind of knew it would be because I read the book, a pretty phenomenal book. Unfortunately, the movie wasn’t entirely realized because it got shy about doing what was in the book.

GQ: You wish you could have gotten more into the male mentality, like in the book?

Raquel Welch: It’s not that I wanted to go into the male mentality, but into the duality. There’s a duality in every man and every woman. And when you have a homosexual man who’s a movie critic and he wants to make himself into a woman who somehow resembles a film goddess, like the women in film from 1935-1945, and then you have to watch how she interacts with these young people who have know idea who they’re really dealing with. The film never could embrace the different layers of complications of what’s going on with Myra/Myron. I mean, if you could make a film like Harvey where a guy walks around and talks to a rabbit that you can’t see, then you should be able to do that—with really terrific writing—and make a movie that really resonated. And I think they could still make that movie. Not with me, I don’t want to do it. I just mean as a piece of cinema, you could do it. It would be fun, fascinating, and really funny.

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